Ukraine: The Truth Wins. The Proxy War Was and Is a Foreseeable Tragedy

War is a Racket: Finger pointing, scapegoating and a little reflection

[Patrick Lancaster in Donbass, June 2022.]

Published: 2023-11-10

Update (same day): apart from a minor edit, the comments section was locked on publication. Oops! Fixed.

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Narritives Succumb to Reality

The two Alexes in the most recent The Duran episode call what has been obvious for months. It has finally becoming impossible for the spin masters to ignore reality. Namely, Ukraine is not at a “stalemate” in its conflict on behalf of US/NATO with Russia. It is not even losing. It has thoroughly, irrecoverably lost. I recommend listening to their discussion. Note that it moves quickly from reporting on recent events to the unreliable art of postulating about the future.

Mercouris relates recent comments by the Russian Federation’s President in which Putin lays out how he sees the remaining Ukrainian territory from an historic perspective, which is essentially Russia pre-declaring its negotiating position as maximalist. Russia will start negotiating when they feel like it. Russia wont feel any to begin discussions. It holds all of the cards. The outcome is so obvious now that the Federation has begun looking at how it wishes the peace to be settled.

There will be various investigations which may need to be done. The peoples of the Donbas have suffered hurrendously for a decade, with shellings of markets and schools and hospitals etc.. They are going to need to heal from the terror. One can expect this to be done in the style of Russian culture. Monuments will be built, schools and performance halls dedicated, military decorations issued.

Attention from authors like myself will move away all too quickly. What remains behind in Donbass will be of quite some interest. They are a very brave people. They have a generation of young with horrific trauma. How can they transcend that and not internalize a hatred? Perhaps the Russian Orthodox Church can play a role. Life will return to a more normal form with marriages and births and the building of houses (and much infrastructure).

A war crimes tribunal may assist. It may also just resussitate war trauma and do more to engender hatred than foregiveness. Forgivegiveness is what will be needed. The regular people of the Ukrainian side of the 'line of control' in eastern Ukraine have been propagandized into war to serve the interests of people far away whose language they do not natively speak. Compassion and understanding are what is required, as Nicolai Petro wrote so many months ago using ancient Greek Tragedy as framework for his analysis. [See sources for his lecture on his book about healing in Ukraine.]

That which befalls central Ukraine and Galicia does not bear thinking. There is a lost generation and the emmigration of a third of the population. That which is left behind and valuable, the land, the soil, will be purchased by foreign entities. The remaining population will become disenfranchised in their own country. On top of this they will internalize the anger of defeat.

Mercouris is asked by Christoforou after they consider the wrecked relations between Russia and most of Europe, how would you describe Scholz? “The clown who brought Germany down”, was the answer. The foolishness, the ignominy for Scholz is difficult to bear considering. To have accepted the US destruction of the thing which enabled their export economy, cheap Russian energy, only to have it replaced by a more expensive one which requires the construction of LNG facilities to use it, all of which are an additional up front cost. Germany's compliance with the US' drive to proxy war with Russia via Ukraine was astonishingly stupid. To have one's chancellor stand there and nod as the US president, an aging puppet-fool himself, tell you that this is what is going to happen and Scholz just stands there like a manikin and later issues no meaningful response must have been horribly embarrassing for the German people. Scholz, you destroyed your nation’s industry and forced a reliance on US energy supply, the same backstabbing micreants who forced it upon you!

Mercouris rightly singles out Angela Merkel. He asserts that she should have understood the importance of the Minsk II accords which she helped negotiate. But she has admitted that she ran the early part of the implementation as a charade to allow the arming of the AFU (Armed Forces of Ukraine).

I think Mercouris missed the point. Recall the flood of international media about the Nazi's in Ukraine in early 2016? If any nation on Earth should have been able to see what was coming, it was Germany and especially its leader Merkel, an East German who speaks Russian. The US used these white supremicist Ukrainian Nazis both as the muscle for the coup, and to instigate the civil war via the "Anti-terrorism" campaign. Are you telling me that Merkel couldn't see an "anti-terror campaign" run by Nazi's from Galicia against the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine as a disaster in the making?

While Scholz is a fool, Merkel could have ensured the Minsk Accords were implemented and should have understood the importance, the serious risk of what would come with a corrupt Ukraine allowed to be hollowed out by a corrupt US oligarchy while Galician Nazi's inflitrated the AFU and fueled the already begun civil war. Merkel is not alone in this betrayal and failure. Her French counterpart President Hollande was complicit in this NATO plan to arm Ukraine for a US proxy war.

As Vijay Prashad recently observed when examining the stupidity going on in Gaza, Nazism is a European thing. It is a Eurpoean crime and they have not attoned for it. Blaming the Arabs via the Israelis is perverse. Europe still has that problem sitting under the surface while it is run by a bunch of ideological technocrats who have no idea about what is going on internationally, geopolitically and geoeconomically.

Hungary's leader deserves quite some acknowledgment. He withstood an EU funded direct political attack where all of the non-governing parties banded together to try and remove him. He still won handily. If other leaders of Europe would like to learn how to not fall for the stupidity which the EU commission and its technocrats have been foisting on the member states, they can take a trip to Budapest and enjoy some goulash with Orban.

Following the Tragedy

Each of those 50 of you who subscribed way back when will probably know that I was following the OSCE reports daily during the lead up to the Russian Federation's SMO. I'd been listening to Russel "Texas" Bentley, and people interviewed by Regis Tremblay. It was clear that the SMO was entirely provoked by the US through Ukraine, and as we know, Ukraine did what they were told, mostly.

Austin spoke the truth for once. The US mission was to weaken Russia. A bunch of old Cold Warriors thought why not? They could go for a two-fer, exactly as Senator Graham said; feed the MIC while stupid Ukraininas get killed and they get to attack Russia. It is that simple. There was nothing very clever going on. It bears out the adage of always assuming ineptitude and malice before any grand plan.

Yes, there were biosecurity labs in Ukraine, and I'm certain that various bioweapons were tried. I would be most interested if Russia chooses to open investigations into this. I expect they wont. It would just scare people. They know what was being done in Mariupol and elsewhere.

US military planners should take a leaf out of Pepe Escobar's book, take his advice, and listen to Andrei Martyanov if they want to understand Russian military capability and how it is likely to act.

Of all of the analysts I've read, I credit Martyanov as being the most keenly informed. Yes, he's a Russian patriot and gets carried away now and then, but his tone usually gives it away when he's being a little more liberal with his ideas than is his more calm want.

From the US side, Macgregor and Berletic military analysis was excellent. Berletic's understanding of the impossbility, the poisoned challice being handed to Ukraine was wonderfully based on his experience as a tankman. The training and the logistics were going to be impossible. Four different main battle tanks with four different guns and four different maintenance procedures being forced to be operated by newly trained crews across a 1000 Km wide front against what quickly became one Russia command using only their own eqiupment was an easy call for Berletic. Macgregor's strategic understanding was equally excellent. He saw straight through the big "summer offensive" before the "spring" one which eventually destroyed the 3rd Ukrainian replacement army.

Russia did not have the forces in place around Kharkiv to hold. They fell back, gave up the territory and some equipment to preserve their fighting force. Again and again, Russia would do this. Each time the AFU would follow and suffer terrible losses of soldiers and materiel for the caputre of territory which held no strategic value, only to slowly lose it again.

On the 'daily analysis' side, my award goes to Dima of the Military Summary Channel. He paid painstaking attention to detail, gathering reports from both the Russian Military and from the Ukrainian equivalent while he maintained his own maps and superimposed on them those from both the Russian and US sides (Institute for War) to provide the clearest possible picture through the fog of war.

For on the ground reporting, there were a few reporters from RT, including Roman Kosarev, who did an excellent job. My award goes to Eva Bartlett. Her work on the lack of 'mass graves' by interviewing the grave diggers, her coverage of the 'petal mine' horror used by the AFU and especially her coverage of the incineration of the prisoner of war camp holding Ukrainian prisoners from Mariupol was outstanding. The POW facility was destroyed with a deliberate direct missle attack by Ukraine, were pure on the ground investigative journalism. For the up-front with the people award, it has to be for Patrick Lancaster. I'll never forget the report in which the old lady shared strawberries with him and his cameraman while Ukraine was dropping artillery shells only metres away.

I hope, readers, that you gained some insight from this newsletter's reporting on the conflict. I am very glad that it will soon come to an end, at least for the people of Donbass.

The denouement is still to play out, so more reports will be issued. But we can see the ending now.

The Cold Warriers ran the dirty war in Syria, into which Russia came to perserve its Tartus naval base. It had just preserved its counterpart in Sevastopol by filling the security vacuum after the people of Crimea bloodlessly ejected the Ukrainian security forces from the peninsula. The Cold Warriors tried again by upping the ante in Donbass and managed to force Russia's hand to prevent a genocide.

What they have achieved is an acceleration of the multipolar world. Its non-US and non-EU currency based trade flows are well established now. BRICS and the SCO have grown. NATO's European nations will be spending lots of money on restocking their military inventories while their economies suffer due to a lack of cheap Russian energy. The European arm of NATO is an irrelevant military paper tiger. The nations of Europe are undergoing a significant political change. Whether the EU survives is not an unwarranted question. Much will depend on how they interact politically and economically with the BRICS/SCO/EAEU organisations. Should they wish Russian energy again, they will not need to grovel but they will need demonstrate contrition and read with far more detail the security proposals which Russia issued in December 2020.

Russia has successfully defeated everything the US warmongers could throw at it. Yes, the US MIC stole heaps of money from US tax payers and will soon get more from European ones, but the profits from those will end up in Swiss bank accounts rather than building infrastructure or improving the education for US or European citizens.

Russia has finally become allied with a partner which will offer the respect which Russia wishes and deserves. I do not understand the US and European animosity to Russian culture. At its best, Russia produces brilliant scientists, engineers and artists. It did not take the maritime colonial power journey, but expanded into a land based power. This expansion brings different colonial challenges than the maritime version. Russia has managed to assimilate neighbouring territories into its civilizational culture more successfully than its European martime equivalents.

China has also found in Russia a partner which offers it the respect it desires. This other ancient land based empire is rising again. With mutual assurances of support they can be confident in being able to resist whatever malign machievelian machinations the western plutocrats and schemers throw at them. They have built the international mechanisms to hold discussion, that old term diplomacy, with other nations independently of the post WWII structures built by the US and the non-Russian European victors.

Both Russia and China are about to play a far larger role in world affairs than was the intention of the aging ideologues in the west. Ironically, they engineered it. Heinrich Kissinger is a war criminal, but was also a keen geopolitical analyst. Russia and China needed to be kept apart by the US to maintain its position of dominance. The current crop of unstrategic geopolitical think-tankers driving US foreign policy couldn't see an iceberg with a radar beacon on it.

Russia not only has world leading military tech, it now has a well mobilized and trained military. I hope that Russia uses these wisely. It will soon be time for Vladimir Vladimirovich to choose a successor. It will be a very long time before another citizen does as much for their mother Russia.

Meanwhile, China is inexorably moving towards the centennary of the victory of its Communist Party over the western supported Kuomintang in their civil war which pre- and post-dates WWII. The territory of Taiwan is a key to this, which the US well understands, hence the provocations. If I may be so bold, I recommend to the Taiwanese that they learn from their brothers and sisters in Hong Kong. Accept the "One Nation Two Systems" approach upon which China will insist. Then take very seriously the components of security law which China will demand. This was Hong Kong's failure. The recent CIA and local oligarch fueled unrest there needed to be handled with less delicacy than China would have wished. Know, Taiwanese, that you will be used a geopolitical pawn. See what happened to Ukraine (or the Kurds, for that matter) and learn the lessons on offer.

Can we move to a world less dominated by military conflict and more focussed on human and national, cultural development?

Which other metrics would you add to assess the emerging multipolar world?

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Sources

A Bowl of Strawberries Under Shelling: The Voices and Faces of Donbas, YesXorNo, 2022-06-23

Knocking on Kherson while Kicking Kharkiv: War is a Racket, YesXorNo, 2022-09-16

Choosing the youth to Die for Taiwan, YesXorNo, 2021-08-07

Ongoing Report: Escalation of Conflict on the Line of Contact in Eastern Ukraine, YesXorNo, 2021-02-21

West will choke on Putin's terms for Ukraine, Mercouris and Christoforou, The Duran, 2023-11-09

VIDEO: ACURA’s Nicolai Petro: The Tragedy and Healing of Ukraine, Professor Nicolai Petro, ACURA, 2022-02-03

Vijay Prashad On The Genocide Committed Against The Palestinians By Israel And The Collective West, Pascal interviews Prashad, Neutrality Studies, 2023-11-04

Culture

May I suggest that you listen to this stunning piece of masterful electric guitar (and great rhythym section support) while you read the latter part of the above article and contemplate the tragedy created in Ukraine.

Stevie Ray Vaughan - Little Wing

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